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New IPs, we're told, aren't really feasible at the tail-end of a generation, so it's heartening to sit down and discover that a sizeable part of the games industry is sticking its tongues out at the likes of Yves Guillemot and Peter Moore; 2013's looking like it's going to be an absolutely stellar year for Actual New Games. So what's an Actual New Game, then? Cast your mind back through the fog of the past 12 months and you might recall Tom defining them as games that "invent new styles and genres... games that we can't easily decode from the first half an hour of play, and that leave us brimming with wonder and excitement and babbling to one another about the amazing things they do."
2012 didn't do too bad in that regard. There was the unexpected pleasure of Brendon Chung's 30 Flights of Loving, or the melancholy spirituality of Journey. And then were the games that reminded us of styles so long forgotten they felt new: Dishonored's mesh of stealth, mystery and a gloriously realised world, The Walking Dead's emotionally charged revival of the adventure genre or XCOM's muscular strategy.
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